We have allowed our love stories to end too early. We seem to know too much about how love starts, and recklessly little about how it might continue.

...workplace dynamics are no less complicated or unexpectedly intense than family relations, with only the added difficulty that whereas families are at least well-recognised and sanctioned loci for hysteria reminiscent of scenes from Medea, office life typically proceeds behind a mask of shallow cheerfulness, leaving workers grievously unprepared to handle the fury and sadness continually aroused by their colleagues.

Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.

A slightly more conscious awareness of writing as compensation may lend us energy to acknowledge our unrequited ache for more visceral forms of contact.

Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate.

You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.

Marriage: a deeply peculiar and ultimately unkind thing to inflict on anyone one claims to care for.

A person cannot be at once a libertine and a married Romantic, however compelling both paradigms might be.

For Proust, an injection of jealousy is the only thing capable of rescuing a relationship ruined by habit.